The Missing Piece of the Puzzle – Transforming the Safety Culture at Luberef

Change requires believers; people who are willing to deviate from the
well-trodden path to carve a new one. But that takes courage, effort,
time and dedication. All of which Saudi Aramco Base Oil
Company-Luberef decided to commit on a November day at the end of 2011
to improve the company’s safety performance which had plateaued. In
discussion with DuPont Sustainable Solutions (DSS) the company
embarked on a journey to unlock its potential for an improved safety
management system and best in class performance.

Luberef is the only base oil producer in the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia, supplying companies such as Shell, Mobil, Caltex, Fuchs and
Petromin Corporation. Founded in 1978, it now operates as a joint
venture between Saudi Aramco and Jadwa Industrial Investment. It also
exports the high quality base oil manufactured at its two refineries
in Jeddah and Yanbu to more than 15 countries around the world. It is
a fast growing company, with significantly expanded production
capacity at its Yanbu site planned to come online in 2016.

Luberef success factors …

Visible commitment by Luberef leadership

Clear,
accountable structure of responsibilities

Fixed safety
expectations that are part of KPIs and formal assessments

Tracking of leading indicators as well as lagging ones … that
led to measurable results

7 million man hours without Lost
Time Injury (LTI) at both Luberef sites

Total process
incident rate cut by 75% (December 2014)

Environmental
incident rate at 0 (December 2014),

Total occupational
health incident rate at 0 (December 2014)

Total recordable
injury rate, for both employees and contractors, cut by 100%
(December 2014)

In anticipation of this planned expansion, the question of how to
bring about safety change became critical in 2011. In 2003, Luberef
had already tried to implement a safety management system by itself
without help from others, but only achieved limited success. As Samir
Khan, who was safety and security manager at the time and is now
corporate risk coordinator and project manager for the safety culture
transformation project, explains: “One could say that safety used to
be ‘policed’. That was the culture in which Luberef had grown up.
Safety was a discipline issue and considered to be the sole
responsibility of the safety department. It was very hard to make
people realise that safety is everyone’s responsibility.”

In describing the past work safety culture, Saad Saud Bukhari, a
maintenance field foreman says, “we used to look for a solution after
an incident had happened. The root cause was always human error. The
culture was one of attaching blame.”

Hussam Al-Johani, inspection engineer, says the result was that
“people were afraid to report any unsafe conditions. They would
by-pass procedures or safety requirements in order to save time.
People would only follow the safety rules in front of officials. For
example, they would wear the safety belt only when they reached the
main gate of the refinery.”

Abduhllah Banakhr, specialist mechanic, is equally forthright:
“Hundreds of changes were implemented without proper review and
without documentation. Near misses were not reported.” Initiatives
would start and stop in isolation with no clear link between them.
There was consequently only limited safety awareness at Luberef. Mr.
Ibrahim Al-Faqeeh, vice-president manufacturing says: “The drivers of
the safety effort did not really believe in it and consequently did
not push it. As a result, the safety system was never adopted from the
ground up.

When I looked at incidents, I could see a link, but there was no
proper system in place to make that link visible to everyone. That is
why we ended up having repetitive incidents.”

Visible tracking of the safety performance at Luberef ’s Jeddah site

All that came to a stop in 2011, when Luberef ’s president realised
safety had to be tackled in an over-arching process with help from
outside. As Luberef President and CEO Dr. Hasan Alzahrani says:
“Safety is one of our core corporate values and an integral part of
our strategic objective. As such we look at safety as a way of not
only doing business, but rather as a way of life, because we want to
be safe at work, at home and on the road. Our major challenge was not
creating a safety management system or policy or procedures. Although
these are imperatives for any successful safety program, our challenge
was to establish the mind-set, behaviours and culture needed to
achieve and maintain safe actions and conditions. That is why we
embarked on a journey to transform our safety culture. Our aim is to
be a leading company for the sake of our people, properties, community
and shareholders.” Luberef had worked with DuPont in 1994 on very
successful manager and supervisor training. The decision was taken to
call DuPont back in to study Luberef ’s culture and develop a
systematic approach to safety management.

… But an integrated approach

Mr. Al-Faqeeh says: “Back in 2011, I was refinery manager at our
Yanbu site. I really liked the comprehensiveness of the DuPont
approach. It tackles all aspects of operational risk management in an
integrated fashion from mechanical integrity to risk assessment, from
management of change to contractor safety and more. I looked at their
approach to safety and thought ‘This is what is missing. It has the
potential to not only improve safety, but the whole manufacturing process.’’

DuPont carried out an initial assessment of the Luberef sites in
2011 and subsequently made several recommendations. These ranged from
developing safety leadership competencies to putting in place a best
practice safety management system, training all levels of the
organisation, setting up a self-maintaining safety management
structure, as well as a change in incident reporting and a move from
tracking lagging indicators to measuring leading indicators as well.

Alan Walton, DuPont project manager, says: “It became clear that the
key success factor of the project would be to move the Luberef
organisation from focusing on reactive indicators to predictive or
proactive indicators. Based on DuPont’s observations, Luberef at the
time had a high incident potential. This would not be reduced if the
company only addressed the efficiency of the safety management system
and the safety culture itself. The company also had to act on the
risks identified by improving incident reporting, carrying out first
and second party system audits and putting in place a strong
behavioural observation programme.” DuPont was very clear that these
programmes would only be successful if they were championed by senior leadership.

Obtaining employee engagement

DuPont introduced Luberef to the key elements of operational risk
management. Each element was assigned a task team with a project
leader. DuPont supported Luberef in its internal development of each
of the 22 elements, training the task teams in best practice so that
they could pass these learnings on to the wider Luberef teams. DuPont
also helped Luberef to develop new standards and procedures. Elements
were introduced sequentially, with the final team, responsible for
emergency preparedness and planning, starting work in December 2014.

“Luberef showed real commitment to the new safety effort,” Mr.
Walton says. “Not just through active participation of the senior
leadership in regular safety observation visits and audits, but also
by introducing all process safety elements during the design and
construction phase of the projects and by including almost a third its
workforce on project teams.”

Samir Khan believes this was necessary as there was initial
resistance to the new safety programme from different levels fearing
the change in workloads and implementation difficulties. “At the
beginning, they thought this was just another initiative that would
stop as soon as the company president left and everything would revert
back to the old way of working.” Mr.Al-Faqeeh confirms this. “People
did resist. They were waiting to see if the project would fly or fail.
We had to keep pushing. This project is like a messenger. To convert
people, you have to be patient. You have to make them understand that
everything has something to do with safety. Nothing is outside of the
safety framework. It’s a 360 degree process.”

Dr. Alzahrani also emphasises the need for full commitment from
everybody in the organisation. “We want to create buy-in at all
levels. This starts with building awareness, then leads on to belief
in the safety culture and develops into a passionate commitment. Only
then can we say that we really have the buy-in of all our people.”

That is also why Luberef has made safety part of its employees KPIs,
formal appraisal and job plans. Even bonus payments are linked to
safety targets. In 2014, achievement of safety KPIs accounted for 25%
of every employee’s bonus payment. This is just one way in which
Luberef demonstrates the value leadership places on safety and sets
clear expectations. It is of benefit to Luberef employees as well, as
Mr. Khan points out. “We didn’t use to train and enhance safety
management skills. Now we do. For our engineers, for example, this is
an attractive addition to their professional CVs.”

Kannath Krishna Prasad, a mechanical engineer at the Yanbu site, has
seen a marked difference in employee engagement. “We have observed a
continual improvement in the safety culture,” he says. “We started
discussing the safety issues within our maintenance team. Also, our
daily meeting now commences with a safety contact. 98 % of our
employees attended the e-learning program and re-certification is due
within a year.”

Safety roles and expectations are now clearly communicated to
employees. Aileshkumar Hirvania, E&I superintendent for
maintenance at the Jeddah site explains: “We conduct a tool box talk,
explain the job safety analysis to the operators, conduct safety
meetings and provide incident alert information. Although we had work
safety before, it has become more organised and analysed, and
provides us with useful information.”

Khalid Zahrani, a lead operator says operators now have “better
handover, better log sheets, are more aware of the importance of
personal protective equipment (PPE) and are more aware of the risks of fatigue.”

Anas S. Al-Rasheed, a process engineer at the Yanbu site believes
“the general safety culture of the workforce has drastically improved
over the past year. Operators and technicians are more careful when
signing permits, isolating equipment and during daily routine jobs,
but I believe that the safety culture needs to be polished from time
to time to prevent it from getting rusty.”

Visible changes

With this amount of input and focus on safety improvement, Luberef
has already seen results. By November 2014, both the Yanbu and Jeddah
refineries had operated more than seven million man-hours without
incident. They had also both executed turnarounds without any LTIs. By
December 2014 the total process safety incident rate had dropped by
75%, and the environmental incident rate, the total occupational
health incident rate and the total recordable injury rate, for both
employees and contractors, all stood at 0.

So much for the lagging indicators, but Luberef is also using
leading indicators to track progress and they show that both the
Jeddah and the Yanbu site have proactively followed up safety
observations with immediate actions to almost 90%.

The improvement in safety has a knock-on effect on productivity and
output, as Mr. Khan explains: “If the plant is working safely, we save
time. Our target for mechanical availability of the plant is 98 %.
This year, we will achieve and may even exceed that target.” At both
sites, Luberef is also doing considerably better than its targeted
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF).

This is not only visible to senior management, but also to employees
at other levels. As Afsar Sherwani, process engineer at the Yanbu site
says, “due to the work safety transformation, incidents and near
misses overall have been reduced which results in an increase in
production and a reduction in lost man hours.”

Operations manager Sami Mulla backs this up with a concrete example.
“We recently started up a vacuum unit. Before doing so we carried out
a Prestart-up Safety Review (PSSR). We were sure we would have no more
surprises with PSSR and carried out the start-up days earlier than
normal. DSS has changed the way in which our company operates by 80
per cent.”

DuPont will carry out another progress assessment towards the first
quarter of 2015, but the interim assessment from 2013 already showed a
marked improvement in the relative cultural strength score of the
manager population. In other words, managers are involved in and are
experiencing change. The graph below documents an increased
involvement in safety improvement activities in Q8a, increased
empowerment to take action in Q10, greater quality and effectiveness
of safety meetings in Q12c and an improvement in the safety of
physical facilities in Q20a.

However, Mr. Al-Faqeeh is not one to sit still. “I have come to
realise that safety is not a destination, but a journey. We have seen
a change in mind-sets and in safety perception, but we still have a
way to go before employees manage safety independently. You cannot
change people overnight. So, there is room to speed up the change
process. However, I know now that there is no way back. We have passed
the critical stage and so many people are now committed to the new
safety process that we will keep improving.

He is not alone. Shift lead operator Khalid Zahrani says: “Safety is
a core business value and integral to the very existence of the
organisation. It is obvious that there is a difference between before
and after, but there is a need for further work, for more achievements.”

For 2015, Mr. Al-Faqeeh is adding new items to his safety index.
Luberef will be looking at contractor safety and will track more
leading indicators.

One day I will leave Luberef,” Mr. Al-Faqeeh says. “When I do, I
will leave behind an improved safety culture. That will be my legacy.”

“Safety is one of our core corporate values and an integral part of
our strategic objective. As such we look at safety as a way of not
only doing business, but rather as a way of life, because we want to
be safe at work, at home and on the road. Our major challenge was not
creating a safety management system or policy or procedures. Although
these are imperatives for any successful safety program, our challenge
was to establish the mind-set, behaviours and culture needed to
achieve and maintain safe actions and conditions. That is why we
embarked on a journey to transform our safety culture. Our aim is to
be a leading company for the sake of our people, properties, community
and shareholders.”